Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Liberty

by Ryan T. Anderson

But how will we insist that fathers are essential when the law has redefined marriage to make fathers optional?

Laws that reflected the truth about marriage reinforced the idea that the home of a married mother and father is the most appropriate environment for rearing children. That ideal has not only been abolished but condemned as bigotry.

Now that the law has changed to teach that marriage is whatever consensual relationship you find most emotionally fulfilling, people will start to believe it, and then they’ll start to live accordingly. They will be more receptive to sexually open relationships, or temporary ones, or multiple-partner ones, as their appetites and fancies dictate. You don’t have to take my word for it.

Many proponents of same-sex marriage are gleefully predicting just that. The result will be less family stability, which hurts children and women and especially the poor.

Same-sex marriage, she argues, “does more than just fit; it announces that marriage has changed shape.”

“primarily a way in which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another.”

“when he states that allowing same-sex couples to marry will weaken the institution of marriage. . . . It most certainly will do so, and that will make marriage a far better concept than it previously has been.”

“conferring the legitimacy of marriage on homosexual relations will introduce an implicit revolt against the institution into its very heart.”

“demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution.”

“fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake . . . is to transform the notion of ‘family’ entirely.”

As a logical matter, making that essential characteristic optional makes others—such as monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence—optional as well.8

And yet weakening marital norms and severing the connection of marriage to responsible procreation are the admitted goals of many prominent advocates of redefining marriage.

“varied, creative, and adaptive contours,”

In their statement “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage,” more than three hundred “LGBT and allied” scholars and advocates call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.

“denormalize[] heterosexual monogamy as a way of life” and “rectif[y] past discrimination against homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, and care networks.”

“individuals can have legal marital relationships with more

than one person, reciprocally or asymmetrically, themselves determining the sex and number of parties, the type of relationship involved, and which rights a...

perhaps the practice is more natural than we think: a response to the challenges of monogamous relationships, whose shortcomings . . . are clear. Everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: can one person really satisfy every need? Polyamorists think the answer is obvious—and that it’s only a matter of time before the monogamous world sees there’s more than one way to live and love.

Now that the court has eliminated sexual complementarity as an essential characteristic of marriage, no principle limits civil marriage to monogamous couples.

They’ve lived together for twenty-five years. Their financial relationship is the same as the same-sex couple. They share household expenses and household chores in the same way. They care for each other in the same way. Is there any reason why the law should treat the two groups differently?

“Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective ‘two’ in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not.”

“It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.”

Not once did the court explain why marriage was limited to twosomes once they got rid of m...

We have just witnessed a successful lawsuit demanding “marriage equality” for same-sex couples. But on what basis could the court deny marriage equality to same-sex throuples? Or mixed-sex quartets?

“We often protest when homophobes insist that same sex marriage will change marriage for straight people too. But in some ways, they’re right.”

Anti-equality right-wingers have long insisted that allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of “traditional marriage,” and, of course, the logical, liberal party-line response has long been “No, it won’t.” But what if—for once—the sanctimonious crazies are right? Could the gay male tradition of open relationships actually alter marriage as we know it? And would that be such a bad thing?26

Here’s how a marital lease could work: Two people commit themselves to marriage for a period of years—one year, five years, 10 years, whatever term suits them. The marital lease could be renewed at the end of the term however many times a couple likes. . . . The messiness of divorce is avoided and the end can be as simple as vacating a rental unit.

Indeed, both the pro-choice movement and the movement to redefine marriage reduce human community to contract and consent and limit our obligations to other human beings to those we have freely chosen. Consider their slogans: “My body, my choice.” “I consented to sex, not to having a baby!” “Love makes a marriage.” “Marriage should last as long as the love lasts.” They all reflect the belief that consenting adults should do whatever they want to do, a belief that puts adult desire before the needs of children. And weakening marriage will lead to a culture with more nonmarital sex, thus more nonmarital pregnancy, and sadly more abortion.

Redefining marriage will also increase the use of assisted reproductive technologies.

In March 2015, Time magazine ran a story titled “Get Ready for Embryos from Two Men or Two Women,” trumpeting the possibility that stem cells could create eggs from men and sperm from

women.29 And, of course, there are efforts to create artificial wombs.

Redefining marriage redefines parenthood. Adults must have what they want, including children. If those children cannot be conceived through a natural act of love, they must be manufactured. Far more children will be destroyed than will be born, of course, but we have decided that adult desires come first.

The law makes no allowance for a healthcare plan sponsor’s conscientious beliefs about life, marriage, or parenting.

“It’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is—it is going to be an issue.”

“They are laws. They are not constitutional requirements. That was the whole point of my question. If you let the states do it, you can make an exception. . . . You can’t do that once it is a constitutional proscription.”

The ruling is as clear an example of judicial usurpation as we’ve had in a generation. Nothing in the Constitution justifies the redefinition of marriage by judges. In imposing on the American people its judgment about a policy matter that the Constitution leaves to citizens and their elected representatives, the court has inflicted serious damage on the institution of marriage and the Constitution.

The majority of the court has simply replaced the people’s opinion about what marriage is with its own—without any constitutional basis whatsoever.

We must, above all, tell the truth: Obergefell v. Hodges is an illegitimate decision. What Stanford Law School Dean John Ely said of Roe v. Wade applies with equal force to Obergefell: “It is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” What Justice Byron White said of Roe is also true of Obergefell: It is an act of “raw judicial power.” The lawlessness of these decisions is evident in the fact that they lack any foundation or warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution. The justices responsible for these rulings, whatever their good intentions, are substituting their own views of morality and sound public policy for those of the people and their elected representatives. They have set themselves up as superlegislators possessing a kind of plenary power to impose their judgments on the nation. What could be more unconstitutional—more anti-constitutional—than that?

“has been with us for millennia. And it—it’s very difficult for the Court to say, oh, well, we—we know better.”

“Ten years is—I don’t even know how to count the decimals when we talk about millennia.”

“has been the law everywhere for thousands of years among people who were not discriminating even against gay people, and suddenly you want nine people outside the ballot box to require states that don’t want to do it to change . . . what marriage is.”

“Why cannot those states at least wait and see whether in fact doing so in the other states is or is not harmful to marriage?”

“is fair and necessary to say these references were based on the understanding that marriage is a union between two persons of the opposite sex.”

“is by its nature a gender-differentiated union of man and woman. This view long has been held—and continues to be held—in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world.”

But when a policy considered unjust by some nonetheless has some reasonable basis, and when the Constitution is silent about this particular policy, judges should not strike down the policy merely because of their own “new insights.” For they, too, could be wrong. Far from rectifying an injustice, they may be committing one. And in purporting to vindicate a newly discovered constitutional right, they may be violating the Constitution by usurping the authority of the people and their elected representatives in Congress and the state legislatures.

In Obergefell, the court usurped that role by imposing a decision in a contest between two reasonable policy views on which the Constitution is silent.

“presumed a relationship involving opposite-sex partners.”

It’s all about consenting adult romance and care. Marriage just is, on Justice Kennedy’s account, legally recognized companionship.

Here Justice Kennedy discusses children reared by same-sex couples without once acknowledging that some might want a mother and a father.

He asserts an adult’s right to have children but says nothing